It follows from this that the disciplined and watchful eye may find already existing objects as revelatory as any created by the artist. For such objects are not made by artistic will and intention but by the hazards of chance and change, and the artistic act consists in their discovery.
Gooding
What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies, and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.
From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted.
At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.
Calvino
I rhyme to see myself,
to set the darkness echoing.
Heaney
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.
Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
Borges
From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment...
He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers - whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead... There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place.
Bierce
a particular capacity of line is its capacity to create surface.
Kandinsky
Feeble traceries of twigs, the past
Thrusts from the black mould of the present
Vince
The Atlantic has bitten into the island's neck like a stoat, and will in time consume it all. Aran is a dying moment.
Robinson
All I know is what the words know, and dead things,
and that makes a handsome little sum,
with a beginning and a middle and an end,
as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Beckett
I even tried to bury myself alive
but the dirt recoiled
you have already rotted it said
there is nothing left for me to do
Kaur
